


of resin and rebirth

by lackingsoy



Category: Code Geass
Genre: All or Nothing, During Canon, Emperor Lelouch, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Knight of Zero Suzaku, Love/Hate, M/M, Pre-Zero Requiem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-08-13 10:27:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20172733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lackingsoy/pseuds/lackingsoy
Summary: “Is this how it will always end with you?” Suzaku says, seething.there are more terrible ways to die.





	of resin and rebirth

“Is this how it will always end with you?” Suzaku says, seething. “In heartbreak?”

Lelouch looks at him, eyes lost to the moon's light.

“In death,” he says, hollowed. Then Lelouch smiles his small and desolate smile. “You will give that to me, won’t you?”

“You are miserable, Lelouch.” She says, nearly spits it. There’s a low lit fire in her eyes, her face distorted in anger, grief, a sadness that breaks and breaks. Lelouch thinks that she is fit to take the throne, now. 

“Do you even think about the people who have fallen to your schemes?” Nunnally grips the bars, thin hands going white with the strain. Hair falls across her eyes, beads of light stinging bright. “Did they mean _anything_.” Did she mean anything.

Lelouch looks at her. Imposed on his mind: her hands, palms up in offering of a paper crane. A wish, a world. (_W__hy don’t you understand her smile? Her beautiful smile-- _)

“No,” he says, and he doesn’t kneel down like he would have when they were still brother and sister. Lelouch doesn’t shake, but he lets a fist unfurl at his side. “No, none of them meant a thing.” 

Nunnally looks at him. “You are cowardly,” she says.

(--_was her way of expressing gratitude. _) 

“Why don’t you write a will?”

She says this as he stares at the empty sheets scattered across his tabletop, quill cast to the side, ink smeared over his fingers. The fire flickers in its hearth, paper like linen scraps along its coals and bitten bark. Lelouch scoffs, the sound scratching out of him.

“For whom. After my death, anything bearing my name will be set aflame.”

C.C. goes to him, hands feather-light against his skull. Unconsciously (and young-like), Lelouch unclenches his shoulders and folds under the touch. Her fingers skim across a head of ink, curling nails into his scalp. A dry palm emerges down his forehead. “A letter, then," relaxing her arms so they settle loosely around his throat. Lelouch closes his eyes.

“For whom,” he asks again.

“Anyone,” C.C. replies easily. Her arms withdraw, fingers a fading pressure on his slow, slow pulse. Closed eyes, closed mouth, her voice a wisp of sound: “Anyone at all.”

Sleep, strangely, brings dreams in the few hours it has with him.

He dreams of great bellowing trees, vast reaches of lands bearing sun and soft streaming light. He dreams of the sea. Her harsh textures, rock and sand and debris, yet smoothed and flushed red and gold by endless equalizing waves. He dreams of Japan, freed; a world he will never see.

Lelouch opens his eyes. A rung of his chair digs into his side. An pervasive kink in his neck that pulses when he lifts his head. Dark. The sun has long set. Lelouch catches a sliver of a body to his right, intentionally moved into his peripheral.

“Suzaku." Lelouch tries to track him in the darkness. He swallows. His throat is dry, parched with silence. 

“You weren’t in your room.” Suzaku's voice says.

Lelouch’s mind is carefully blank, still doused in the uneasy smog of neverlands. His body creaks when he lifts himself from the seat. His eyes adjust; the world is black, except for the faint chutes of the moon's light extending into the room. Lelouch becomes aware of absence, elongated into suspension. Fear and horror and poignant expectation, idle and respondent. Soon enough.

“Where is C.C.?” he asks, suddenly, because could there be a part of him that still wants some unspoken thing, careful and precise and useless? He is flint-like. Already struck. 

"Gone."

Lelouch looks at him. Suzaku doesn’t move closer, body caught between the door and the long table. Lelouch watches his face, watches for his eyes. 

White superimposes black in one brief moment, when Lelouch moves. The cold press of the window is at his back, breath sliding from him in a harsh gasp. Suzaku’s face comes into view, brow pinched and shadows chased, teeth just barely trapped behind closed lips.

“What are you doing?” Lelouch aches along his bones. He tests slightly against the grip, fabric twisting, caught. Flesh caught. He is caught. This is an old game.

“Holding you captive,” Suzaku says, hardly apologetic for this one. “Or you’ll run.”

“I wouldn't.” Lelouch turns his face back and can't help the sneer that enters his voice, splits it apart a little. Suzaku's eyes flicker with something like recognition. “Playing dumb doesn’t suit you, Lelouch.”

"So the truth disappoints you." An edge cuts across his face. “And what have you come for? To say goodbye?" When Suzaku says nothing, and meets him with the same futile eyes, Lelouch wants this to be over. "Let me go."

Suzaku doesn’t. “You always do that,” he says. 

"What, exactly," Lelouch feels the taste of anger on his tongue, stale and pointless.

“This,” fingers in cloth, tremors there that shake into the rest of him. Suzaku's eyes sting. “This retreat into your own world.” 

Lelouch smiles, again, opening a palm. “Do you need me to hold your hand, then, like when we were children?”

Suzaku's face is young, open and wide with something that Lelouch can't touch. His fingers press into Lelouch's skin. "Shut up," he says softly, as if angered, as if mistaken, as if to ask _why us_. His eyes grow dark; and isn't it so raw; aren't they both so used? Two strangers with the same blood.

_Live! _

Soon. Lelouch thinks, looking at Suzaku, his wide eyes and closed mouth, seeing Nunnally's hands, gripping the bars and bruising against it.

“You will have me at your feet soon,” he says, as a final answer. He knows what he'll find, but he looks anyway: the sheen there in Suzaku's face has little to do with anger, or hate.

"Don't," Lelouch says. When he goes to lift his hands, the grips on his arms fall away. Suzaku’s cheeks are warm, damp heat in his palms. Lelouch wipes a thumb beneath a green eye as Suzaku looks back. _Who?_ He wants to ask, stubbornly. _Who is this for?_

This boy who is neither a savior nor executioner, a knight nor reaper. They are barely surviving in one another’s aftermath. 

Lelouch leans forward, and Suzaku molds to him, easy, this, how Suzaku's wet face noses along Lelouch's neck, their hands stuck on fists full of glass stuck on a world that leaves scars stuck on a future that will finally make sense.

They slide to the floor. Lelouch's creases his arms across Suzaku's back, and breathes, faintly, a metaphor in the light that Lelouch can barely see, feel. Suzaku is pressed there, he who is not his own and his eyes that are closed now, unspoken. Lelouch turns his face toward him. 

“It has to be you,” Lelouch says, and he feels Suzaku tremble with it.

_Live_, and he looks at Suzaku, the light that has grown soft.

Soon.


End file.
